1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to wireless telecommunications, and more particularly to short message service and Internet Protocol (IP) messaging.
2. Background of Related Art
A short message service (SMS) is a service that enables bidirectional transmission of short alpha-numeric messages to and from a Short Message Entity (SME), i.e., a device or system capable of sending and receiving short messages.
A read acknowledgement feature for the short message service (SMS) is a feature that delivers an SMS message with a timestamp (i.e. an SMS read acknowledgement) to an SMS sending device, to indicate an approximate time at which an SMS message sent from that SMS sending device was opened at an SMS recipient device. The existing Delivery-Ack is generated by the SMSC indicating that delivery has been successful, while Read-Ack is generated by the receiving entity.
The short message service (SMS) conventionally supports read acknowledgement through an IS637 (Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)) short message interface and a Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP) protocol. Current technology does not define interoperability between Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) (3GPP2), Short Message Peer-to-Peer (SMPP) protocol, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) (3GPP1), Long Term Evolution (LTE), and Mobility Management Entity (MME) interfaces. Moreover, mobile use cases for the short message service (SMS) read acknowledgement feature are not currently defined.
Unfortunately, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) (3GPP) does not support read acknowledgements for the short message service (SMS). Hence, a mobile device using the GSM short message service (SMS) cannot receive a text message notification indicating a time at which an SMS message sent from that mobile device was opened at an SMS recipient device.